Shuttle Lands Safelly


The Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely.

Discovery landed at Kennedy Space Center at 9:14 a.m. in only the second shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster killed seven astronauts.
"Welcome back, Discovery, and congratulations on a great mission," Mission Control told shuttle commander Steven Lindsey after Discovery rolled to a stop.

"It was a great mission, a really great mission, and enjoyed the entry and the landing," Lindsey replied.

The smooth landing was sure to leave NASA officials jubilant, after conquering the chronic threat of foam chunks that break off the external fuel tank during launch - still a problem, but not a serious one in this mission.

The shuttle came in from the south, swooping over the Pacific, Yucatan Peninsula, Gulf of Mexico and across Florida to cap a 5.3-million-mile journey that began on the Fourth of July.

A last-minute buildup of clouds led NASA to switch the shuttle's direction for landing. By the time Discovery approached, it was so cloudy, Lindsey couldn't spot the runway until about a minute before landing.

A couple of minutes out, NASA made a racket to keep birds out of the way of the approaching spacecraft. Car horns blared, and the sound of gunshots and firecrackers erupted.

At touchdown, shouts and whistles came from the few hundred astronauts' relatives and space center workers at the runway. "It's exciting to see the shuttle back," said astronaut Scott Kelly, the identical twin brother of Discovery's co-pilot, Mark Kelly.

"We're back on track with maybe flying the shuttle regularly here starting again in August."

Atlantis is up next with a crew poised to carry out assembly of the international space station, a task put on the back burner after Columbia.

I guess that's what really counts. Compared to last time, it was a lot less scary.

Hotel Orbitalia? Hotel Balloonia?


A private consortium is trying to build an inflatable object to float up to Low Earth Orbit. It's a going to be a hotel. Here's the article.

Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 1 module activated its compressed air tanks to inflate the skin as planned, and is now sending back low-res photos to earth.

The concept of an inflatable craft was conceived by Nasa in the 60s, and is much cheaper than standard spaceships as it takes up less room on the launch vehicle.

The only inhabitants of the 15ft by 8ft module are cockroaches, but the company is planning two more missions over the next year and believes a full-sized version for humans could be ready by 2010.

Fears that a giant bouncy castle might be a little prone to being punctured by space debris are apparently unfounded – the walls contain Kevlar, which is used in bullet proof vests, and the internal temperature is said to be a pleasant 26 degrees.

Founder Robert Bigelow is also trying to stoke up competition by launching ‘America’s Space Prize’, which is offering $50 million to any US company that can create a craft that can take 5 people into space. Looks like long weekends in space might be on the cards soon.

Clearly, the space race has now been privatised.

Battery Operated

This is a battery operated aircraft. That's right.
This aircraft flew 59 seconds for 391m using 160 A batteries, recording a maximum altitude of 5,2m. It spans 31m, and weighs 54kg. It was flown by Tomohiro Kamiya of Tokyo as part of a University project.
The craft was sponsored by Matsushita Electric, othrwise known to us as Panasonic. I guess they brought the batteries.

Fangaroo

Scientists have made some interesting discoveries regarding pre-historic marsupials.

SYDNEY, Australia - Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. Paleontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom."

A University of New South Wales team said the fearsome fossils were among 20 previously unknown species uncovered at a site in Australia's northwest Queensland state.

Professor Michael Archer said Wednesday that the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolflike fangs were found, as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.

"Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines (fangs) like wolves," Archer told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Vertebrate paleontologist Sue Hand said modern kangaroos look almost nothing like their ferocious forebears, which lived between 10 million and 20 million years ago.

The species found at the dig had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh," Hand said.

The team also found prehistoric lungfish and large ducklike birds.

"Very big birds ... more like ducks, earned the name 'demon duck of doom', some at least may have been carnivorous as well," Hand told ABC radio.

Archer said the team was studying the fossils to better understand how they were affected by changing climates in the Miocene epoch between 5 million and 24 million years ago.

The Demon Duck of Doom. Now I know what my nightmares have been about all these years. :)

Not A Good Outcome

Like I said some months before: Launching rockets is difficult stuff to do.
The INSAT-4c went up in smoke as GSLV FO2 rocket veered off course and exploded 60seconds after lift-off.

SRIHARIKOTA (AP), JULY 10:A day after the Agni-III ballistic missile failed to meet test expectations, India’s space programme took a knocking when the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV FO2), carrying the INSAT-4C communication satellite, veered off course and exploded 60 seconds after lift-off.
The three-stage rocket burst into flames during the first stage operation, a minute after lift-off at 5.38 pm from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, some 80 km from Chennai.

The failure of the Rs 256 crore-mission was being attributed to pressure in one of the four strap-on motors dropping to zero in the first stage operation, causing the GSLV to “deviate slightly” from the designed trajectory.

“This is one of the rarest phenomena and could be due to a problem in one of the strap-ons which led to the mission’s failure,” said a crestfallen G Madhavan Nair, ISRO chairman, while briefing the media after the launch mishap.

“The problem developed in the course of the first stage. After the deviation, we gave the ‘Destruct’ command because we had to safeguard locals,” he said, adding that the debris had fallen into the sea.

“A quick look at the preliminary findings show that of the four strap-on motors, pressure in one of them dropped to zero. The other three functioned normally,” said Madhavan Nair. This caused the deviation in the trajectory. While four degrees of angular error was within the normal limit, the vehicle went off the path by 10 degrees.

"Until 60 seconds, we received huge data on the telemetry. But it has to be analysed and this process has been initiated. We will know what exactly caused the failure in the next few days,” he said.
According to the ISRO chief, work on another INSAT-4 satellite was on and “we will have a successful launch within a year”. This would be a heavier satellite and would be launched from Kourou in French Guiana.

It's not an easy road ahead.

The Weekend Dumpdown

INSAT-4C Satellite


The Indian Space programme is about to launch its rocket GSLV with the INSAT 4C satellite from Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

This is the first launch of GSLV from the state-of-the-art Second Launch Pad (SLP) at SDSC. SLP, which was commissioned in May 2005 with the successful launch of PSLV-C6 is designed to reduce the occupancy time for the integration and launch.

The GSLV would lift off with the 2168 kg INSAT-4C, the heaviest in its class, at 4 30 pm tomorrow, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair said.

The 49-metre-tall, 414 tonne GSLV is a three stage vehicle. The first stage, GS1, comprises a core motor with 138 tonne of solid propellants and four strap-on motors, each with 42 tonnes of hypergolic liquid propellant. The second stage has 39 tonne of the same hypergolic liquid propellant. The third (GS3) is a cryogenic stage with 12.6 tonne of liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen (LH2). INSAT 4C, the second satellite in the INSAT 4 series, would give a boost to Direct-to-Home television services, video picture transmission and digital satellite news gathering. It will also provide space for National Informatics Centre's VSAT connectivity.

Call me 'rocket boy' but this is exciting. We wish them godspeeed.

Space Walking


The shuttle crew did a space walk to make certain there were no significant damages to the shuttle.

British-born astronaut Piers Sellers and American Michael Fossum took turns strapping their feet on to a small platform and dangling from the end of a 30m boom that would allow astronauts to reach every part of a shuttle.

"It's like being in a very slow elevator," Sellers radioed to ground controllers as he rode atop the end of the boom, which is a combination of the Space Shuttle Discovery's 15m robot arm and a 15m extension.

The exercise, performed at 28,000km/h, 357km above the Earth, was part of NASA's efforts to recover from the 2003 Columbia disaster and make certain there were options for repairing a damaged shuttle before it returned into the atmosphere. Seven astronauts on Columbia in 2003 died without knowing their shuttle was critically damaged when insulation foam fell off during liftoff. The vessel broke apart over Texas as it returned to Earth. "Hopefully, we never have to use it but we have the capability if we ever need to," flight director Tony Ceccacci said after the boom test.

It seems the sshuttle is a-okay for the return. This is much better than the last effort.
The last re-entry scared the bejesus out of me.

Hayabusa Debrief


Sorry this one's in Japanese, but it's from he JAXA symposium. The salient point is that the asteroid-visiting Hayabusa mission was given better and fairer coverage overseas than in Japan.

サイエンスに、感謝されたはやぶさプロジェクト
　「はやぶさ」の評価は日本よりも、海外の方が高かったと、山根氏が「サイエンス」誌の最新号を壇上で掲げながら、川口プロジェクトマネージャーと、話を始めた。サイエンスの編集長は、はやぶさプロジェクトの偉業をたたえるとともに、小惑星の地質の情報が分かったことで、地球に小惑星がぶつかる可能性があるとき、それを避けるための実際の情報として使えると、感謝の意を表している。アメリカや、ヨーロッパでは、恐竜を滅ぼした原因と言われる小惑星の地球への衝突に対して、真剣に回避を考えている組織がある。

　サイエンスが日本の探査機の成果を大々的に取り上げるのも異例なら、その成果に対して感謝の意を表するのも大変異例のことであり、日本の研究技術レベルに大きな誇りを感じると、山根氏が感激気味に話した。

なぜ意味があるのか
　地球−太陽−いとかわの距離はほぼ等しいが、なぜそんなところにいって、サンプルを持ち帰る意味があるのかを、川口氏が話した。だれも着陸したことがない、火星より遠い小惑星いとかわに着陸し、かえってくることも大きな意味を持つが、地球や、太陽系のできたころの姿が、保存されている。小惑星のサンプルを持ち帰ることができれば、地球の火山活動でマントルから出てきた、かんらん石などの成分と、比べることで実証できる。

　はやぶさは、いとかわの地面に、弾丸を打ち込んで、サンプルを吸い上げる実験には失敗したが、弾丸を打ち出す部屋は３つあり、弾丸も３つ。ひとつ打つごとに部屋が回転して、サンプルを吸い込む仕組みになっている。はやぶさが地面に着いたとき塵が舞い上がったりして、それがサンプルの取り込み口から自然に入る可能性もある。アメリカのスターダスト計画が、今年彗星の尻尾から持ち帰ったサンプルは、ミクロンオーダーだが大変貴重な情報になった。はやぶさにも、ほこり程度でも入っていれば、大変な成果だと思う。

The projected recovery of the asteroid sample will be in 2010.

Shuttle Launch On Independence Day 2006

NASA says the shuttle launch is a success.

The Space Shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven astronauts have blasted into orbit on NASA's first launch in a year. The lift-off went ahead despite objections from some within NASA who argued for more fuel tank repairs. Discovery finally cleared the tower after two weather delays and last-minute problems with the insulation foam.

Problems with fuel tank insulation were what doomed the shuttle Columbia and her crew in 2003. A piece of foam the same size as a slice of bread could be seen falling off Discovery during the launch. But experts said it was too small to pose a safety risk.

Discovery is aiming to link up with the International Space Station. But commentators say if anything goes wrong with the mission, it could mean the end of the Shuttle programme, and George W. Bush's plans for further exploration of the Moon and Mars could be in jeopardy.

The modified fuel tank went well, apparently.

"I think the tank performed very, very well indeed," said Wayne Hale, NASA’s space shuttle manager during an evening press briefing here at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). "We saw nothing that gives us any kind of concern about the health of the crew of the vehicle."

Hale’s comments came after a quick first-look at imagery of Discovery’s launch, arrival in orbit and the jettison of its external tank after the spacecraft and its seven-astronaut STS-121 crew launched into space on July 4 at 2:37:55 p.m. EDT (1837:55 GMT).

During that cursory look at a veritable flood of images, video and radar data, shuttle analysts found seven instances – of which five are related to fuel tank foam debris – of objects falling from Discovery’s launch stack.

"We put the tank under a microscope this time," Hale said. "It did not perform flawlessly, in that we lost some foam off the tank apparently."

Although the Telegraph in the UK is reporting this:

America's accident-prone space programme hit more trouble yesterday when the shuttle Discovery shed several chunks of foam insulation shortly after take-off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Nasa said a number of pieces fell from the external fuel tank during the launch but insisted that by then the shuttle and its crew of seven were beyond the point in its flight where the debris could pose a hazard.

"This isn't too abnormal," said Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for spaceflight. "We fully expected to lose some foam."

Engineers maintained that the flyaway debris was expected to be small and any damage it may have caused would have no extreme consequence to the shuttle at the most dangerous point in its flight, its re-entry to Earth's atmosphere in 11 days.

The flight was delayed twice because of bad weather and there were further last-minute jitters over a chunk of insulation foam that fell from the fuel tank in the build-up to take-off, leaving a 4 in scar at the top of the tank.

After the broken chunk was discovered, Nasa's top engineer and chief of safety wanted to postpone Discovery's launch until the damage had been fixed.

Make of that what you will, but let's hope the whole thing keeps going well, safely.

The HII And HII-A Rockets

Just thought I'd post this diagram before I forgot. It illustrates the bits they improved and changed from the all domestic HII rocket to the new and improved HII-A rocket. Apart from a drastic reduction in parts there are some structural changes that are noteworthty. The bit that connects the first and second stage known as the interstage section was one of the places where they vastly reduced parts and mass.

Back To The Other Future

No Laughing Matter
NASA thinks the next generaiton of space craft will be back to the rocket model they so disavowed at the dawn of the Space Shuttle era.

Instead of being carried into orbit piggy-back like the shuttle, its replacement will be sent into space as the payload of a rocket, in similar fashion to the Apollo Moon landers.

Steve McDanels, manager of Nasa’s failure analysis branch at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, said that this was the only certain way of protecting crew capsules from the sort of damage that caused the Columbia disaster in February 2003.

“Having a payload-type craft application, where the craft is integral to the structure, is going to be the way forward,” he said. “There is no possibility of a foam strike that way.”

None of the designs currently under consideration for the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will replace the shuttle in 2012 features a winged, reusable craft, and it is highly unlikely that Nasa will return to the model that symbolised manned spaceflight in the 1980s and 1990s. “I think that won’t be at the forefront of the technologies explored,” Dr McDanels said.

This amounts to a total write-off of the last 20-30years of NASA since the Apollo missions ended. You really wonder where all that money went. Ugh. Talk about a 'wasted generation'.

They Don't Like Negativity
Engineer Charlie Camarda was displaced from the Shuttle crew in the upcoming launch.

WASHINGTON - New York astronaut Charlie Camarda has been bumped from his top NASA engineering post for backing colleagues who questioned the safety of Saturday's planned space shuttle launch, NASA officials said yesterday.
Camarda's removal heightened the turmoil over NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's decision to take the "acceptable risk" of launching the Discovery orbiter despite warnings of potentially fatal blastoff debris.

Camarda, who flew aboard the troubled flight of Discovery last July, told colleagues in an e-mail that he was fired from his post as chief engineer at Houston's Johnson Space Center and given another NASA engineering job.

"I refused to abandon my position and asked that if I would not be allowed to work this mission that I would have to be fired from my position and I was," he wrote.

Camarda, 54, of Ozone Park, Queens, said he supported the dissents on launch safety made by NASA safety chief Bryan O'Connor and engineer Chris Scolese.

Maybe it's not such a bad thing for his health.
The Shuttle is scheduled for lunch this Satutday.

The HTV

JAXA Release Details Of HTV
While the whole International Space Station hangs on the shuttle mission, JAXA have released their idea of supplying the ISS.


This is the HTV 1/20th Model:

I've seen this object sittng in one of the foyers in Tsukuba. The model has moving sections when you press a switch up front.

This is how the HTV will be launched, on the the H-IIB rocket:


The HTV module is much heavier than any of the other pay-loads JAXA have fired into orbit. It's certainly rated to be beynd the capacity of the current H-IIA rocket system. Hence the development work going into the successor.

Once the HTV is launched and detached, it docks with the ISS:



...at one of the nodes.



What's really interesting about the HTV is that it has a pressurised section and a non-pressureised section. Once in docking position, people on the ISS can get into the HTV's pressurised section as one of the modules of ISS. Then there is the de-pressurised section which can be exposed to the hard vacuum.
This is a mock up of the actual HTV



When I was there, they were laying in and testing electrical circuitry in this thing.
Now that I see these photos, I'm kind of a little nostalgic about my time there in Tsukuba. I was so exhausted by the end of the trip and it was the last location so I couldn't wait to get out of there; but looking back and seeing these photos, I kind of regret not pestering for more information.

This Week's News

Hubble Trouble


The Hubble Telescope's main camera has shut down and this is creating a problem. Here's an entry from WaPo:

The Advanced Camera for Surveys, a third-generation instrument installed by a space shuttle crew in 2002, went off line Monday, and engineers are still trying to figure out what happened and how to repair it.

"It's still off line today," Max Mutchler, an instruments specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said Saturday.

Engineers are hopeful the problem can be fixed, said Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman at Goddard Space Flight Center outside Baltimore, which is responsible for managing the Hubble.

A bad transistor could be causing the trouble, Campion said. If so, a backup could be used. Another suspicion is that some of the camera's memory was disturbed by a cosmic event. That could be fixed by reloading the memory.

"Both possibilities are things that can be resolved here on the ground," Campion said.

The loss of the camera has not shut down the telescope entirely, he said.

"The Advanced Camera for Surveys is regarded as sort of the workhorse for the telescope, but there are other instruments that are still working," Campion said.

Meanwhile...

Everything Riding On This Shuttle Launch
Observers are saying that everything is riding on this coming shuttle launch.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Space shuttle Discovery will carry more than crew and cargo for its scheduled July 1 launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The whole shuttle program's future is riding on this flight.

The stakes could scarcely be higher: if the flight proceeds with a clean, safe lift-off and a trouble-free 13 days, NASA officials have planned two more shuttle flights this year, aiming for the eventual completion of the much-delayed International Space Station and a possible fix for the aging but cherished Hubble Space Telescope.

But if Discovery is seriously damaged at launch and the shuttle crew is sent to shelter aboard the space station, NASA chief Michael Griffin has said he would consider ending the quarter-century-old shuttle program.

In that case, Griffin said on June 17, "I would be moving to shut the program down. ... I think, at that point, we're done."

That would make it virtually impossible to finish building the space station as currently designed or repair the Hubble. It would also leave the United States with no homegrown way to get humans to space until the next generation of vehicles is ready, probably around 2011.

Ouch. You just pray that this flight doesn't kill another seven astronauts. WaPo article is more matter of fact:

Discovery's commander, Steve Lindsey, said he was encouraged by the forthright design debate since NASA was criticized after the Columbia disaster for squelching dissent.

"Both sides were listened to, very vocally and very publicly," Lindsey said. "You had a group of engineers who said, 'Change it.' Managers decided, 'Don't change it.' I guess time will tell which side was really right."

Armed with data from each new flight, NASA managers and engineers plan to make changes to the foam on the tank before each future flight until the fleet is grounded in 2010. The next-generation vehicle isn't expected to fly until around 2014.

NASA managers have acknowledged that another fatal mistake could ground the three remaining shuttles before the international space station is finished being built. It also could rule out any chances of a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

"Look, if we go fly and have another accident, that will be the end of the program," Hale said recently. "I'd rather not fly and say we couldn't get our act together ... than rush into some ill-advised launch where we had a catastrophe."

This isn't exactly encouraging to read at all.

Nix And Hydra
Pluto's been found to have 2 more moons.

Pluto's two new moons formerly known as S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2, have been named Hydra and Nix by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the recognized authority for assigning names to celestial bodies. The announcement was made 21 June 2006 in IAU Circular 8723. The two moons were discovered with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 2005.

Oddbjørn Engvold, General Secretary for the International Astronomical Union, says: "I am very pleased with the decision of the IAU Planetary System Nomenclature Working Group".

There we go.

Melroy's Space

New Female Commander For The Shuttle
Here's the link.

Air Force Col. Pamela Ann Melroy will become the second woman to command a space shuttle mission when her crew heads to the international space station next year, NASA announced.

Melroy, 44, follows in the footsteps of Eileen Collins, who charted a groundbreaking career as the first woman to pilot and command a space shuttle.

Collins retired from NASA in May after serving as commander last year of the first space shuttle since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Melroy and five crew members will fly to the international space station aboard space shuttle Atlantis to deliver a module that eventually will connect to European and Japanese science laboratories, NASA announced Monday. The mission is tentatively slated for late summer 2007.

Other crew members are pilot George Zamka and mission specialists Scott Parazynski, Doug Wheelock, Mike Foreman and Paolo Nespoli.

It will be the third shuttle mission for Melroy, who served as a pilot on shuttle flights in 2000 and 2002. She is a native of Palo Alto, California, who graduated from Wellesley College and earned a master's degree in Earth and planetary sciences from MIT.

Hopefully this mission is all going to work out fine. We all know what a craptacular concept the shuttle is now, it's scary we're sending anybody up in it, but it does owe a few trips to the ISS.

Mo' Space Shuttlin'

Space Shuttle Luanch Date Set
This is despite the usual current objections.
Here's the article.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, overruling objections from the agency's chief engineer and safety office, cleared the shuttle Discovery for launch July 1 on a mission to service and resupply the international space station. The flight also will clear the way for the resumption of station assembly later this fall and deliver a third full-time crew member to the international outpost.

The objections centered on the risk posed by launching Discovery with foam buildups around brackets on the ship's external tank that are now formally classified as "probable/catastrophic" in NASA's integrated risk matrix. That means it is probable that the so-called ice-frost ramps will shed debris with catastrophic results over the life of the program.

Griffin told reporters today he did not agree with the probable/catastrophic classification and added that even in a worst-case scenario, the astronauts would not be in immediate danger. Because of new cameras and other sensors, any damage would be seen and the crew could either attempt repairs or move aboard the space station to await rescue by another shuttle crew.

Here we go again.

If It Talks Like A Duck And Walks Like A Duck...


It was most probably a duck.

Paleontologists have unearthed the exquisitely preserved fossils of what is the oldest known ancestor of modern birds, a loonlike swimmer and flier that flourished in lake country 110 million years ago in what is today northwest China.

The fossils included five headless but otherwise nearly complete skeletons that show the outlines of soft tissues, including feathers and ducklike webbing between the toes. Researchers said the find suggested modern birds may have evolved from aquatic ancestors.

An international team led by Hai-lu You, of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, found the fossils, known as Gansus yumenensis , in Gansu province near Changma, a mountain community about 1,200 miles west of Beijing. Results of their research are reported today in the journal Science.

"They were clearly able to fly but were also adaptable for swimming and diving," said team member Matthew C. Lamanna, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "We don't know what they ate because we don't have a skull, but the legs and feet are those of a diver. He had a powerful kick stroke."

Anybody for calling it Peking Duck?

News To You?

Getting Ready To Leave
Stephen Hawking says we might have to leave Earth to survive as a species.

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday at a news conference in Hong Kong.

The British astrophysicist said that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

“We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,” said Hawking. He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Need we say more about the cause for space when Stephen Hawking himself pitches in?

STS-121 Update
The crew have arrrived for launch rehearsal.

The next seven astronauts to fly the space shuttle Discovery arrived at NASA’s Florida spaceport Tuesday, each confident they will launch early next month and eager for a final dress rehearsal, their commander said.

Veteran shuttle astronaut Steven Lindsey, commander of NASA’s STS-121 shuttle mission slated to launch July 1, said he believes the mission will lift off early in its 19-day flight window.

“I and my crew are pretty optimistic that early July looks good,” Lindsey said after his crew landed here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to practice launch countdown procedures with shuttle ground crews and mission controllers.

NASA managers will meet at KSC this weekend to pick a hard launch date for the STS-121 mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the space agency’s second planned shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia accident, and hold press conference Saturday afternoon, NASA said in a statement.

Lindsey and his fellow shuttle crewmates walked off their jet transport at about 4:37 p.m. EDT (2037 GMT) after a two-hour flight from Houston, home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and one day of delays due to stormy weather spawned by Tropical Storm Alberto.

A veteran of three shuttle flights, Lindsey introduced reporters to his STS-121 crew: Discovery pilot Mark Kelly, mission specialists Michael Fossum, Lisa Nowak, Piers Sellers, Stephanie Wilson, and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Reiter.

And so it goes again.

I just found a site features some interesteding technology news. Check it out.

Space Shuttlin'

...Across the Universe
They have started to move Space Shuttle Discovery to Cape Canaveral in preparation for the next launch scheduled in July.

Air Force Col. Steven Lindsey will command the next mission, designated STS-121. The shuttle is to dock with the international space station, delivering supplies and dropping off German astronaut Thomas Reiter.

Shuttle astronauts Piers Sellers and Mike Fossum are scheduled to conduct at least two spacewalks while the Discovery is docked with the space station.

The first will test the stability of the shuttle's new second robotic arm, called the Orbiter Boom Sensor System, as a work platform. The second is to repair part of the station's mobile transporter, a train track on the exterior that permits its robotic arm to move around.

If time permits, Sellers and Fossum may conduct a third spacewalk to test techniques to repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system.

NASA intends to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010 after completing assembly of the international space station.

The next-generation manned spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, is in the design stage. NASA says it hopes to begin test flights in 2012.

Here we go again. It's always scary.

More Apewatch
Some apes have demonstrated they have the capacity to think ahead.

Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested whether our closest great ape relative--the bonobo--and our most distant--the orangutan--share our ability to plan for the future. The researchers first trained five bonobos and five orangutans to use a tool to get a fruit treat from a mechanical apparatus. They then blocked access to the treat but allowed the apes to handle suitable and unsuitable tools for the task before ushering them into a waiting room for an hour. After that hour, they were brought back into the first room and, if they had brought the right tool, they could use it to get the treat.

The apes both took a suitable tool out of the test room and brought it back in with them after the waiting period significantly more often than predicted by chance. A female orangutan named Dokana proved particularly adept, completing the task successfully in 15 out of 16 attempts. Even when the delay time was extended through the night--14 hours--Dokana succeeded in garnering the tool and the fruit more than half of the time. A bonobo named Kuno did even better with the long delay than the short one, completing the task in eight out of 12 attempts.
To determine whether the apes were simply associating the tool with the food reward, or whether they were actively planning ahead, the researchers devised two more tests. In the first, two of the bonobos and two of the orangutans faced a similar challenge but with only juice as a reward--to discount for the possibility that the apes had taken the right tool previously simply because they were currently hungry. Again, the apes proved capable.
Finally, some naïve apes were presented with tools but not the mechanical apparatus. If they brought back the right tool they were still rewarded with a treat. But most did not, seemingly disproving a simple associative link between the tool and the treat. "Apes selected, transported and saved a suitable tool not because they currently needed it but because they would need it in the future," the authors write in the paper presenting the research in today's Science.

That bonobos and orangutans can plan ahead suggests that the ability evolved in the great apes prior to 14 million years ago rather than in our hominid forebearers within the past 2.5 million years, the scientists note. And other creatures may have undergone convergent cognitive evolution. Indeed, another study published online yesterday by Science found that scrub jays hid and re-hid food depending on whether they were watched by other birds.

How come some people I know have lost this ability? :)

From The Mailbag
Pleaides sent in this link. We may have gone too far.

Record amounts of the Arctic ocean failed to freeze during the recent winter, new figures show, spelling disaster for wildlife and strengthening concerns that the region is locked into a destructive cycle of irreversible climate change.

Satellite measurements show the area covered by Arctic winter sea ice reached an all-time low in March, down some 300,000 square kilometres on last year -an area bigger than the UK.

Scientists say the decline highlights an alarming new trend, with recovery of the ice in winter no longer sufficient to compensate for increased melting in the summer. If the cycle continues, the Arctic ocean could lose all of its ice much earlier than expected, possibly by 2030.

Walt Meier, a researcher at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, which collected the figures, said: "It's a pretty stark drop. In the winter the ice tends to be pretty stable, so the last three years, with this steady decline, really stick out."

Experts are worried because a long-term slow decline of ice around the north pole seems to have sharply accelerated since 2003, raising fears that the region may have passed one of the "tipping points" in global warming. In this scenario, warmer weather melts ice and drives temperatures higher because the dark water beneath absorbs more of the sun's radiation. This could make global warming quickly run out of control.

Dr. Meier said there was "a good chance" the Arctic tipping point has been reached. "People have tried to think of ways we could get back to where we were. We keep going further and further into the hole, and it's getting harder and harder to get out of it."

And so on.
bad news for the polar bears, it says.

Monkey News Day

Chimps And Human Speciation Was Messy According To DNA Analysis
This article is very troubling.
I've put in red the bit that got me chuckling with a kind of horror.

"For the first time, we're able to see the details written out in the DNA," said Eric Lander, one of the collaborators on the study. "What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual."

Unusual, indeed. The researchers, from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, propose that humans and chimpanzees first split up about 10 million years ago. Then, after evolving in different directions for about 4 million years, they got back together for a brief fling that produced a third, hybrid population with characteristics of both lines.

That genetic collaboration then gave rise to two separate branches — one leading to humans and the other to chimps.

The work has inspired both admiration and skepticism. Many paleontologists have a hard time believing some of the humans that are known to have lived during that era could have been pairing up with apes.

"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard who wasn't involved in the study. "My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates — not to put it too crudely."
The research is the latest fruit of the Human Genome Initiative, the effort to transcribe and read out the entire genetic message of human chromosomes, which was completed in 2003.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes that contain about 30,000 genes. Each gene is made of strands of DNA "letters" in a specific order, and the letters can change, by mutation, over time. The rate at which changes occur is fairly constant and very slow.

The number of DNA differences between two species' versions of the same gene is an indication of how long the species have been separate — or not interbreeding and sharing genes.

When the scientists at the Broad Institute compared the genes of humans and chimps, they found one of the chromosomes — the female sex chromosome known as X — was 1.2 million years younger than the others. It appeared the two species shared a common ancestor who gave them their X chromosomes and did so more recently than the ancestors who gave them the other chromosomes.

The best explanation for this, the scientists think, is that ancient humans and chimps broke away from each other not once, but twice. The first time was more than 6.3 million years ago. The second time was at least a million years later.

What probably happened was some of the evolving human ancestors bred with evolving chimpanzees. This was perhaps not as weird as it seems, for though there were some physical differences between the two groups, "the early humans must have looked pretty much like chimpanzees," said James Mallet, a geneticist at University College in London not involved in the new research.

The horror, the horror. It just feels *wrong*.
But now that I think about it, there's a human population out there that fuck sheep; why not chimps?

Monkeys Talk In Full Sentences Here's the article.

Putty-nosed monkeys put two different alarm calls together to create urgent warnings, according to observations recently made of the West African primates.

These monkey "sentences" appear to be evidence of what is widely considered to be a uniquely human ability: stringing words together to convey a message, or syntax.

"These monkeys combine different calls into more complex call sequences with novel meanings," said Klaus Zuberbühler, a psychology researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Zuberbühler co-wrote a study about the monkey calls appearing in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature.

He and co-author Kate Arnold do not make a direct analogy between the monkeys' call sequences and human language. (Read related news: "Monkeys Deaf to Complex Communication, Study Says" [2004].)

But Zuberbühler said that their work shows that "the main carriers of meaning are not the individual calls, but the call sequence."

Monkey "Sentence"

Putty-nosed monkeys belong to a group of African monkeys called guenons. The species' most obvious distinguishing feature, and the one the animals are named for, is a bright white nose that stands out against a brown face.

The monkeys are found throughout the Ivory Coast (map of the Côte D'Ivoire), in parts of Liberia, and along the entire northwest coast of the Congo River.

Groups consisting of a single male accompanying 12 to 30 females and their offspring defend territories within this range.

Like other guenons, putty-nosed monkeys use two loud calls, usually referred to as "pyows" and "hacks." They use a series of pyows to warn of a leopard threatening the group and a string of hacks to indicate the presence of crowned eagles.

Zuberbühler and Arnold found that male monkeys often combine the two calls into a kind of simple sentence that they call a "pyow-hack."

Which is amazing because I've met humans who couldn't do exactly that. Some of them were in charge of science and space policy in Australia! :)

Not Good News

Part 1, How NASA Lost Its DART
NASA has losst onee of its satellites. The automated DART Satellite was supposed to rendezvous with a Pentagon satellite, but somehow it went awry.

The 800-pound (362-kilogram) DART spacecraft – short for Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology – launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on April 15, 2005 atop an Orbital Sciences-built Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft was expected to rendezvous with MUBLCOM, or Multiple Path Beyond Line of Site Communication; a small communications satellite launched for the U.S. military in 1999.

DART’s $110-million mission called for the spacecraft to approach within 16 feet (five meters) of MUBLCOM and perform a series of intricate maneuvers near the older satellite, all without human intervention. The mission was to occur throughout a 24-hour period. But while DART ultimately found and approached the MUBLCOM satellite, it apparently closed to within 300 feet (91 meters) and ran out of fuel, bumping into the target spacecraft while both vehicles were 472 miles (760 kilometers) above Earth.

“Less than 11 hours into the mission, DART collided with MUBLCOM,” the investigation summary states. “MUBLCOM did not appear to experience significant damage, and the impact actually pushed it into a higher orbit.”

According to the mishap summary, DART’s velocity measurements by its primary global positioning system (GPS) receiver were off by about 1.9 feet per second (0.6 meters per second), an inaccuracy that persisted in the spacecraft despite a computer reset because the needed software patch was never installed. DART’s main computer repeatedly detected its velocity anomaly, reset itself, then again detected the same glitch, the summary stated.

An initial mismatch between expected and actual position appears to have started the continuous cycle – which forced the excessive thruster firings – but it was still not enough to lead DART into failure, according to the summary report. A computer logic setting that regulated how much weight the spacecraft gave its estimated and measured orbital speed and positions was set too high, allowing the initial glitch to continue, the summary stated.

Many of DART’s failings could have been avoided if the mission’s team members thoroughly reviewed and applied data and experience from previous NASA projects, investigators found.

And that is that. not a good show.

Global Warming Is Killing Coral Seas
I know this is a bit 'I Told You So', but I told you so.

Earlier studies focused on coral damage but today's report is the first to show the long-term impact on fish and other creatures of the 1998 event where global warming caused Indian Ocean surface temperatures to increase to unprecedented and sustained levels, killing off (or "bleaching") more than 90 per cent of the inner Seychelles coral.

The team, led by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and which comprises researchers from Britain, Australia and the Seychelles, publishes its findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research in the inner islands of the Seychelles in 1994 and 2005 showed that, while the 1998 event was devastating in the short term, the main long-term impacts result when the damaged reefs were unable to re-seed and recover.

Many collapsed into rubble that became covered by algae. The collapse removed food and shelter from predators for a large, diverse amount of marine life. In 2005, average coral cover in the area was just 7.5 per cent.

Not a very pretty sight. Here's another entry from The Environmental News Service.

Lead researcher Nick Graham, of Newcastle University's School of Marine Science and Technology, said, "We have shown there has been very little recovery in the reef system of the inner Seychelles islands for seven years after the 1998 coral bleaching event."

While the 1998 event was devastating in the short term, the main long-term impacts are that the damaged reefs are largely unable to reseed and recover. "Many global warming bleaches simply collapsed into rubble which became covered by unsightly algae," Graham's team writes in their study, published Monday in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," a U.S. publication.

"Reefs can sometimes recover after disturbances," said Graham, "but we have shown that after severe bleaching events, collapse in the physical structure of the reef results in profound impacts on other organisms in the ecosystem and greatly impedes the likelihood of recovery."

Bleaching occurs when corals encounter stressful environmental conditions, explain scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, a partner on the study team. High water temperature is the most prevalent stress leading to coral bleaching.

Stresses cause coral to expel zooxanthellae, the small algae living inside the bodies of coral. Because the zooanthellae give the coral their color, when they dissipate the corals suffer a loss of color, hampering the photosynthesis process. This eventually leads to death of the corals.

The collapse of the Seychelles reefs removed food and shelter from predators for a large number of diverse marine species. In their 2005 survey, the scientists found the average coral cover in the area to be just 7.5 percent.
The survey showed that four fish species are possibly already locally extinct - a type of butterfly fish, two types of wrasses and a type of damsel fish.

Six species are at critically low levels, the scientists found - a type of file fish, three types of butterfly fish and two damsel fish. Their decline probably started to happen soon after 1998, they said.

The survey also revealed that species diversity of the fish community had decreased by 50 percent in the heavily impacted sites. "Reduced biodiversity results in a more fragile and less stable ecosystem," the scientists wrote.

Smaller fish have been reduced in number more quickly than larger species but their decreased availability has started to have a more lasting effect on the food chain, the researchers found, and they projected that this effect is likely to be amplified as time goes on.

They observed a decrease in herbivorous fish, worrisome because these fish species control the spread of algae.

If more people in power only knew how beautiful these things were, they'd probably campaign to make sure they didn't die out like this. It's a tragedy and a travesty.

India To The Moon

Out Of The Blue
The Indian Space Research Organisation is sending 2 NASA Probes to the moon.

Marking India’s determination to keep up with spacefaring rivals such as China, Chandrayaan-1 will be propelled into space by a satellite launcher from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, 100km north of Chennai.

The first Nasa chief to visit India in an official capacity since the early 1970s, Michael Griffin, signed the two memorandums of understanding covering the symbolic collaboration at a ceremony in Bangalore.

The US imposed sanctions on India’s space programme in 1998 following the country’s nuclear tests, but resumed the granting of export licences in September 2001 and has been looking to collaborate with India in developing space technologies. “There was a period of time between our nations where, because of nuclear proliferation issues and other factors, the ability to co-operate on technical matters was less strong than it is today,” Mr Griffin said after signing the deal.

The Indian Space Research Organisation said the two devices – a mini synthetic aperture radar (MiniSar) and a moon mineralogy mapper (M3) – were selected on merit from among 16 firm proposals received from around the world.

The main objective of the MiniSar is to detect water in the permanently shadowed areas of lunar polar regions, while the role of the M3 is to characterise and map minerals on the moon’s surface.

I've added a link to ISRO on the side bar. I wasn't aware they were that advanced.
If even India has a Space programme, why doesn't Australia have one? Seriously.

Fusion Reaction

In Japan they're reporting that they've managed to keep plasma active for a world record 28 seconds.

「プラズマ」維持、世界最長を達成・原子力機構
　日本原子力研究開発機構は、原子と原子をぶつけてばく大なエネルギーを取り出す核融合に不可欠なプラズマという原子状態を、世界最長となる28秒間維持することに成功した。国際熱核融合実験炉（ＩＴＥＲ）の標準運転に必要な条件の下での実験で、核融合の実用化につながると期待される。成果は6月にイタリアで開かれる欧州物理学会で発表する。

　茨城県那珂市の研究施設にある臨界プラズマ装置「ＪＴ—60」で実験した。プラズマを加熱する高速イオンの損失を防ぐため、フェライト鋼という材料を真空容器内に装着。従来の炭素材タイルだけの場合に比べて磁場の形を改良し、プラズマをうまく閉じ込められるようになった。

　ＩＴＥＲの標準運転で想定する状態で、これまでの世界最長記録はＪＴ—60の16.5秒だった。今回の28.6秒はこれを1.7倍に延ばし、ＩＴＥＲの長時間燃焼が実現する公算が大きくなった。

Key points: They did in in Ibaraki prefectue using the Fusion module 'JT-60'. By using a ferrite alloy, they managed to control the magnetic field better inside the vacuum vessel.
It lasted 28.6 seconds, lengthening the time from the previous record of 16.5 seconds. They think that they've seen the light in getting a longer time record, which of course is the hope of fusion research.

You read it here first in English, because there's nary a report in English newspapers this minute!

The Names They Give Themselves

It turns out dolphins give themselves names:

The evidence suggests dolphins share the human ability to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities.
The research, on wild bottlenose dolphins, will lead to a reassessment of their intelligence and social complexity, raising moral questions over how they should be treated.

The research was carried out by Vincent Janik of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University in Scotland, who has found bottlenose dolphins to be among the animal world's quickest learners of new sounds.

"Each animal develops an individually distinctive signature whistle in the first few months of its life, which appears to be used in individual recognition," he said.

The research has its origin in the 1960s when dolphin trainers first noticed captive animals each had their own repertoire of whistles.

Which of course reminds me of the following Larsen cartoon:


Guess you had to be there.

Huygens Update

Movie Time
You can now view the Huygens module descending and landing on Titan in this video here.
An explanation is here.

A little more than one year after the spectacular descent of the European Space Agency's Huygens on Saturn's giant moon Titan, scientists from the probe's Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) have released two new movies of the descent. These represent the best visual product from the mission obtained so far and most realistic way yet to experience the landing on a far-away world.

These movies were built thanks to the data collected by DISR on 14 January 2005, during the 147-minutes plunge through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed. The data were analysed for months after the landing.

The movie "View from Huygens on 14 January 2005" shows in 4 minutes 40 seconds what the probe actually "saw" within the few hours of the descent and the eventual landing.

"At first the Huygens camera just saw haze over the distant surface," said DISR team member Erich Karkoschka, from the DISR team at the University of Arizona and creator of the movies.

"The haze started to clear only at about 60 kilometres altitude, making it possible to resolve surface features as large as 100 metres" he continued. "But only after landing could the probe's camera resolve little grains of sand millions and millions times smaller than Titan. A movie is a perfect medium to show such a huge change of scale."

There is another movie here.

The second, more technical movie (called "DISR movie"), shows DISR's 4-hour operating life in less than five minutes, too. A detailed caption to explain how the movie is structured is provided with the video.

The scientists analyzed Huygens' speed, direction of motion, rotation and swinging during descent, represented in this movie. It also features Huygens' trajectory views from the south, indication of the large and unexpected parachute movements, the changing direction of view as Huygens rotates along with the relative positions of the sun and Cassini, and a clock to follow the actual sequence of events.

Sounds from a left speaker trace Huygens' motion, with tones changing with rotational speed and the tilt of the parachute. There are also clicks that clock the rotational counter, as well as sounds for the probe's heat shield hitting Titan's atmosphere, parachute deployments, heat shield release, jettison of the DISR cover and touch down.

And that is all I have today on Huygens. Enjoy the movies!